Updated glibc packages that fix one security issue and one bug are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having
moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from
the CVE link in the References section.

The glibc packages provide the standard C and standard math libraries
used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the
Linux system cannot function properly.

It was discovered that the formatted printing functionality in glibc
did not properly restrict the use of alloca(). This could allow an
attacker to bypass FORTIFY_SOURCE protections and execute arbitrary
code using a format string flaw in an application, even though these
protections are expected to limit the impact of such flaws to an
application abort. (CVE-2012-3406)

This update also fixes the following bug :

* If a file or a string was in the IBM-930 encoding, and contained the
invalid multibyte character '0xffff', attempting to use iconv() (or
the iconv command) to convert that file or string to another encoding,
such as UTF-8, resulted in a segmentation fault. With this update, the
conversion code for the IBM-930 encoding recognizes this invalid
character and calls an error handler, rather than causing a
segmentation fault. (BZ#837896)

All users of glibc are advised to upgrade to these updated packages,
which contain backported patches to fix these issues.

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